Be diligent - Read all the contents of the documents you sign!

My learning in life so far is "read all the documents you sign". Be diligent. Try to be legally correct.

Where does this help?

1. Housing loan documentation in India is a very complex process. One has to sign every page of a 50 to 100 page document that has all kinds of legal wording. One would be amazed at all the clauses written there and how each clause takes away your right to own the property for which you're taking the loan of course, in case of any default or breach of those terms. For example, I was thinking of closing the loan after 5 years. I knew that there was a clause that says that there will be a penalty if the loan is closed before 5 years. I missed an interim document sent by my bank telling me that the '5 year' limit had been removed and if you don't dispute it then you're in agreement with the modification of terms. If I had been diligent in reading every communication from my bank then I could have done something to protect my rights.


2. In the house sale agreement, my builder had written a description of the property that is being sold. However, when a sale deed is being made for registering with the government body, the description of the property had been changed (probably with a profit motive). I had noticed it before the registration. After understanding the nature of modifications and some consultations with a lawyer, I could make the builder use the same property description in the sale agreement and the sale deed.


3. Protection from fraudulent transaction on credit cards vary from bank to bank and from country to country. When I was in United States, online purchase protection used to cover even non delivery of items where, on dispute, the credit card company will refund money into your account and then follow-up with the merchant. However, in India it is different. The credit card companies wash their hands off once the credit card transaction is authorized by you. In case of online transactions this means that your money is gone the moment you've done a mouse click. Hehe! now that I understood the difference, I'm very careful (mostly, don't use the credit card for online purchase).

Decline to Vote - Election Commission of India Rule

Today I came across the following on the Election Commission of India website:

11. Can you decline to cast your vote at the last stage?

11.1 The law enables a voter to decline casting his vote at the last stage. If you decide not to cast your vote after having signed on the Register of Voters and after having received the voters’ slip from the Second Polling Officer, you must inform the Presiding Officer immediately. He will then take back the voters’ slip from you and proceed to record in the remarks column of the Register of Voters that you have declined to exercise your franchise and you will be required to put your signature under such entry. After this is done, you can leave the polling station without proceeding to the Voting Compartment

Many times, I don't like to vote for the candidates because I feel that they do not deserve to be elected. However, I don't want someone else to vote in my name (poll rigging/fraud) in my absence. Thus, I go and vote for the better candidate of the two. Now, I can go to the polling station, get an entry next to my name saying that "I've declined to exercise my vote". At least, I can avoid letting people committing poll fraud using my name.

Know this before a Property Purchase

I had purchased a flat in an apartment complex in Bangalore. I got into an agreeement with the builder in August 2005. I was given the possession of the flat in August 2008 with only the flat completed to 95%. The rest of the apartment complex is still under construction; even now it is under construction but, in a decent living condition. The registration is yet to happen. There were delays at every stage of this apartment complex during these 4+ years. Many of these delays are because of the personal agenda to be run by the builder and the landowner, where the landowner had given the builder an authorization to construct via a joint development agreement. The personal agenda is about sharing all the extra construction beyond the approved plans that is happening in the apartment complex.

In all these four years, I had learnt the following:

1. Do not buy in an apartment complex where the builder and the land owner are different entities. In my case, the builder had delays in the project construction (some speculate that it is induced by the land owner to gain maximum benefit), which required the builder to pay penalties to the land owner. In lieu of these penalties, the builder is giving right to the club house to the landowner. The landowner now rents out portions of this club house for commercial activities. In addition to this, the builder is constructing several unauthorized flats that are most likely to go to the land owner. Note: The total undivided share of land divided amongst the flats in the approved plan is 79% of the total land area on which the complex is built. This means the builder had intention of building more flats right at the beginning when the agreement was made.


2. Check to see if any litigations are pending. Most often, the documents do not indicate that litigations are pending. Yesterday, after reading a court order document, I realized that there was one pending litigation when the development agreement was made between the builder and the land owner, which the purchasers (like me) are unaware of.


3. Ensure that the sale agreement and sale deed (registered document) both have the same description of the property. The builders make initial agreement with wordings that are good to read. When they make the sale deed, they reduce the scope of the property significantly. This reduced scope allows them to build more in the same area.


4. Do read and understand the scope of Service Tax, VAT that needs to be paid. You might get surprises later.


5. Do all communications to the builder by sending a latter through a registered-post-acknowledgment-due.


6. Pay on time to avoid penalties for delayed payment


7. Insist on construction linked payment plan. This allows you to pay only when the construction happens.


8. Club house membership fee charged. Don't assume that you own a share in the club house unless the sale deed says so.


9. Finally, get/check approved plans from BDA even before getting into agreement

Note: Lawyers to legal verification based on the documents you give them, which are given to you by the builder. The builder might give only those documents that make him look perfectly legal :) Some of the aspects apply to a plot purchase.

Happy property purchasing :)

Flipkart - a good story in making

I had a bad online book purchasing experience with  firstandsecond.com, an online bookstore in India. I ordered a book, which was not delivered. I had another bad online purchase experience in buying a flower bouquet after which I applied brakes to online purchases.

After several months of keeping myself away from online purchases, recently, I purchased few books on Flipkart (http://www.flipkart.com), a Bangalore based startup. The first order was shipped the next day. A day later, I had the books in my hand. I was impressed.

I purchased another set of books for my daughter's birthday. There were only 4 days between the purchase date and the purchase date. The book detail page indicated 7+ days of delivery. I contacted the customer service to see if Flipkart could expedite the shipping of these books. Flipkart did not promise the result. However, they were considerate enough to try and deliver the books in two installments. The first set of books arrived in 3 days time. The second (and the last) installment the next day. This is a very pleasant experience, which makes me a loyal customer of this budding site. I hope they maintain their standards. Thank you Flipkart.

Are people in Bengaluru so insensitive to Ambulance Siren?

Today, near the Marathalli outer ring road signal, I felt really bad to see an Ambulance stuck in traffic. All drivers around the ambulance were looking at the vehicle that was emitting emergency siren. None of them tried to move away to give way to this Ambulance. The traffic signal is just 50 meters away and there were few policemen at the signal. None of these policemen made attempts to clear the traffic to get the Ambulance moving.

Even after the green signal, and the traffic started moving, several vehicles tried to move ahead of the Ambulance from the sides.

Did we loose the concept of 'emergency'? Why can't we understand that we should stop on a side and give way to emergency vehicles?

Public Service Ads by Google

I was going through this website http://www.tecrec.in. Usually, I ignore the advertisements on any page. However, this advertisement caught my attention. The advertisement was about a public service organization http://www.grameenfoundation.org, and the bottom-right of the ad reads "public service ads by Google". I was happy to see organizations trying to promote something with an intent, which is other than money making.

SEM by startups - can they win the war!

Several startups use SEM for marketing. Is this really a good idea? The answer is yes and no.

It is a 'yes' because people get instant exposure to these sites based on the bid words. Traffic to relatively unknown websites (like startups) are very welcome because website visitors are always the revenue generators.

Can this 'yes' transform into a 'no'? The answer is 'yes'.

Let us go back and look at SEM on Google. A startup xyz.com bids on keyword(s) and gets itself to the top rank for those keyword(s). Similarly, a very well known company pqr.com, which also has a good SEM click history bids on the same keyword set. The bid value of xyz.com will be higher than pqr.com. When the user searches using the keyword, Google will show these first xyz.com and then pqr.com in the advertising box. Let us consider the following scenarios:

1. xyz.com has a better ad content. The user is impressed and clicks on the advertisement. xyz.com is charged for this click. Many sites have very high bounce rates. The cause for the bounce off could be because of the site content, the site organization and flow, and also because of the trust level of the user on that site (xyz.com). Majority of times this click results in a loss to xyz.com. However, the SEM optimization engine thinks this as a success for xyz.com and increases its credibility/trust factor. A good vote in favor of xyz.com. If b% of users convert then the effectiveness of the amount spend is b%


2. The user does not click on xyz.com even though it is at a higher rank but, this user clicks on pqr.com because pqr.com is a known website. There are publications that indicate the effectiveness of having ads positioning at positions 2 or 3. At these positions, statistics indicate higher click through rate. This click for pqr.com (and not for xyz.com) reduces the trust factor for xyz.com.

For a relatively unknown xyz.com the probability of 2 is much higher than 1. Thus, the SEM optimization engine is likely to penalize xyz.com because it did not receive the clicks even though it was positioned higher. Now, if xyz.com wants to maintain its ranking, it needs to bid higher. Further clicks not-in-favor of xyz.com will cause xyz.com to bid higher for the same set of keywords. The same is not true for pqr.com, which has already established its trust factor. Also, the b% effectiveness due to bounce rate also adds to the SEM expenses of xyz.com.  Thus, in SEM space, startups rarely win a war against well established companies.

What are the alternatives?

One alternative is to reduce the cost of SEM while keeping the effectiveness of keywords higher. This is something SEM experts are known to achieve. These experts are known to find keywords that are effective and cost low (mainly due to lack of competition). However, their search volume is also very low. A startup has to identify and dynamically modify its keyword set on which it bids to increase visitors through SEM program. This is a search through a long tail of rare search keywords, and user typography errors. Can this search go on for ever?

There is this other alternative some companies had adopted to get to their target user base. Instead of making users come to their website, these companies started to go to the users by identifying areas where the users are more likely to visit. One such approach is to create applications on social networking sites like Facebook, Orkut, and MySpace. Partially, this was a step in right direction. Users, who rarely visit sites like xyz.com, would visit/add the application on facebook/Orkut/... with some curiosity, and after some clever marketing strategies by the application developers. After spending considerable amount of time on this application, these users get used to the content of the xyz application, which establishes a trust factor. Now, getting these users on social networking sites to xyz.com is another big hurdle. Note: I did not see an application that had converted the entire user base to its independent website. Thus, this step is 'partially' in the right direction. It only established the brand of the application. It would have been a completely successful approach if it had made people come to xyz.com.

Disclaimer: xyz.com and pqr.com were used just for explanation. These pointers are not to the actual websites (I did not check  if real websites exist and what they do). Also, my thrust on the trust factor being one of the variables in computing the bid value/ranking for a site by Google is based on some discussions I've read over the internet about Google's way of optimizing its SEM systems.